Mirror in the Sand, Chapter 1

Roses in the Desert

      Jordan is a real country. And Amman, its capital, the City of the Seven Hills, is a real city. But in my hazy memories, it stands like a fairy land, shining in a cloud of rose gold dust, awaiting my return.
     I first arrived in Jordan in 1972. It was night when my family landed in Amman. The embassy staff and their families welcomed us and took us to the ambassador’s residence, which had been vacant since he had passed away. Jet lag awoke me early the next morning so I started exploring. On the ground floor, French doors opened onto a vast terrace at the back of the house. I pulled the curtains open, pushed the door, and walked into heaven.
     This was the end of May, and the morning air was sparklingly fresh. The sun had barely risen and golden rays were just warming up the garden. But what overwhelmed me was bushes upon bushes of roses, red, pink, yellow and white, their fragrance softly perfuming the air.
     There and then, I fell in love with Amman.
     Spring mornings are not the only enchanting moments in the City of the Seven Hills. Sunsets are a regular wonder. You see, the old houses are built with limestone blocks roughly hewn on the outside. When the sun sets, the rays reflect back and forth from hill to hill off these stones, and the entire city is bathed in a golden pink aura. I’d often lie down on top of the roof terrace of our house, and just stare at the glorious expanse of sky, while a tiny airplane shimmered far above. Then, the minarets would wake up and one by one, the calls to prayer would dance in the air, like a ballet of chants.
     The city has developed much since, and numerous are the high-rise buildings and shopping centers. But this land was once the crossroads of three great continents. Can you imagine how many civilizations left their traces here? Actually, you do not need to imagine anything at all. You simply need to bend down and scratch the earth a bit, and you will find antiques with stories to tell.
     Once, my younger brother was playing marbles in the unpaved alley next to our house with the neighborhood boys. They scratched the ground to form a hole for the large shooter, and lo and behold, there, buried in the dirt, was a strange coin. One of the boys rang our doorbell. “Second Sister, look at this! Is this a Chinese coin? Abed (my brother) said these are Chinese characters. Are they?” I took the dusty coin and to my great surprise saw that it had a square hole in the middle. I recognized the words Qian Long on one of the sides, the name of the third emperor of the Qing Dynasty. I couldn’t believe my eyes! Some long ago Arab merchant had been to China along the Silk Road and traveled back here and dropped this coin, which lay undisturbed for centuries until some boys decided to play marbles. What a treasure!
     I tried to look nonchalant and told the boy that I’d pay him half a dinar for it. That was what I used to get for an evening’s babysitting. His eyes lit up. He must have realized it was something valuable. “No, no,” he laughed, and took it back. Decades later, I emailed him to ask whether he still had that ancient Chinese coin. He did not even remember it. I now wish I had offered him one whole dinar or even two.
     Little did I know then that I would spend eleven years of my life, the golden years when I turned from teenager to young adult, in this magic land. We came as a family of seven, but I stayed there eventually alone.
     Three years after our arrival, my eldest sister left for America. Then, in 1977, Jordan severed diplomatic ties with the Republic of China (now simply called Taiwan), and my father, a diplomat in the position of Cultural Counsellor at the Embassy, had to pack up and go home. This was not the first time we had encountered such a cataclysm. France pioneered the movement back in 1964, causing my family to leave Paris hurriedly. Then, the whole world, one country at a time, broke relations with us, recognizing Communist China as the legitimate government of China, and leaving us floating like an orchid without roots, a country without a name. Jordan was really trailing the crowd, and King Hussein actually kindly gave us very friendly terms not only for the severance of ties but for the maintenance of a representative office thereafter as well.
     I stayed behind, along with my younger brother, when the family – Mama, Papa, and my two younger sisters—as well as most of the other embassy folk flew away to various destinations. I was by then enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Jordan, and told my father that I wanted to finish my medical studies smoothly and stop the hopping and skipping around that had characterized my earlier education: 13 schools in five countries and four languages prior to university.
     And thus it was that I moved into a refugee camp (lowest rent we could find) and worked at night at the Jordan Times as a proofreader to support my brother and myself. Three years after that, I was able to send my brother off to the US as well. And so, I alone stayed on in the land of desert roses.
     Today, every year when roses bloom in my Arizona garden, I remember.